PayPal is close to a deal to acquire Braintree, a company that specializes in powering mobile transactions. Meanwhile, Facebook announced that it’s pairing up with payment companies to roll out “Autofill,” which makes it easier for its users to buy things straight from their phones.

Mobile devices are edging closer to fulfilling their long-delayed promise as digital wallets, and tech and financial services players do not want to be left out.

Consumers and merchants are beginning to see the advantage of channeling offline payments through mobile devices, rather than transacting in coins and cash, credit cards — or clunky register systems.

In a new report from BI Intelligence, we explain the main reasons why mobile payments are poised for takeoff, provide proprietary estimates for the growth and size of the mobile payments market in the years to come, and analyze the specific trends that will help shape the growth in mobile payments, including user concerns around security. We track the demographic and geographic nature of ! the cons umers who will drive the growth, merchant-side adoption, and the mobile payments solutions that will lead the charge.

An HTML5 app is housed on the Web and runs inside a mobile browser. Unlike apps built specifically for Apple or Android devices, it does not need to be built from scratch for each operating system. The promise is that it can be “write once, run anywhere.”

It’s true: In many cases, HTML5 can work just as well as a native approach. HTML5 has established itself as the de-facto alternative “platform,” after Google’s Android and Apple’s iOS.

But it is not the silver bullet it is often made out to be, for several reasons. HTML5 faces a fragmentation issue of its own, since there are gaps in the range of HTML5 app features supported by the different mobile browsers. Backers of HTML5 are working furiously to fill those gaps.

So where are we in the HTML5 vs. native apps debate? The status of HTML5 is vital to decisions about where to invest mobile budgets. In an August 2013 report, BI Intelligence analyzes this very question.

Here are examples of where HTML5 is trying to close the performance and feature gap:

Graphics: Web apps are far along in allowing for scalable (users can enlarge them by zooming in) graphics that allow for “the creation of very advanced and slick user interfaces,” according to the W3C, the nonprofit that creates the HTML5 standard.

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Multimedia capabilities are improving. Video and audio playback has become a widely-supported and widely-used HTML5 mobile app feature. Other multimedia features are still in a more nascent stage.

Responsiveness: HTML5 apps can be written so that the device type is detected, and an appropriate app version is delivered. That’s important because of the variety of screen sizes out there. The layout, behavior and resolution are optimized for the screen.

User Data: Web apps are far along in their ability to store app data so that users can return to an app and pick up where they left off. Smooth offline usage is an area that needs more improvement.

Geolocation on Web apps is now basically a solved issue across mobile browsers, while integration with user calendars and address book data is still a work-in-progress.

In fact, the rise of low-cost phablets has ended Samsung’s dominance of this market. Samsung, maker of premium phablets like the Samsung Note, was responsible for 90 percent of phablet shipments in the fourth quarter of 2011, but the company’s share had shrunk to less than 50 percent by the second quarter of this year, according to IDC.

On average, low-cost phablets are priced at around $220, compared to $560 for Samsung devices.

IDC’s data excludes Japan but covers the entire Asia-Pacific region, including Australia, Korea, Malaysia, New Zealand, China and India. The research firm defines phablets as having a screen size of five to just under seven inches.

IDC groups phablets with tablets and laptop PCs into a market for “portable devices,” and in fact phablets are the only device category in the group that’s experiencing growth. Over the first half of this year, tablet shipments have decreased quarter-on-quarter, and laptop growth has been flat.

Back in February, President Obama signed an executive order aimed at beefing up cybersecurity measures and established a 240 day deadline for the administration to hammer out the details. Today, the White House took to its blog to put forth a rather loosely defined set of incentives designed to convince private companies to adopt the voluntary aspects of its so-called “Cybersecurity Framework.” At the top of the list is a proposed cybersecurity insurance market, which calls for the adoption of risk-reducing measures and risk-based pricing models. Beyond those broad brushstrokes, the White House has provided few details, stating that specifics would be developed in the coming months. Also included in the incentives are federal grants for companies taking part in the program, preferential treatment for some existing government services, liability limitations and public recognition. Essentially, the blog post acts mainly as a preview for the Voluntary Program set to launch in early 2014. The details are more than a bit fuzzy at the moment, but we’ll keep you updated as we learn more.

Google’s big shake-up of Android version metrics has already given us a better understanding of where the platform’s active users truly stand. Now that we’re a month into the new methodology, we have a good sense of where those users are going — and they’re moving to Jelly Bean in droves. Android 4.1 and 4.2 combined grew to represent 28.4 percent of regular usage, or enough to finally overtake Ice Cream Sandwich at 27.5 percent. Not surprisingly, the transition to the newer OS involved a balanced mix of users either upgrading from ICS (down by 1.8 percent) or transitioning from devices running Gingerbread or earlier (down 1.7 percent). It will be a long while before Jelly Bean becomes the dominant platform, if it ever does, but we’re not expecting a slowdown in adoption when flagships like the Galaxy S 4 and One are luring many of us into an upgrade.

Microsoft‘s own Surface Pro tablet starts at $899, and many other Windows Pro devices are over $1,000.

But that will soon change, Otellini predicts.

He expects to see Intel-based Windows 8 tablets in the $300-$400 range by the fall:

… I think people are attracted to touch, and the touch price points today are still fairly high, and they’re coming down very rapidly over the next couple of quarters. … [as] OEMs start looking at new form factors … the competitiveness of that platform is going to be substantially different, at price points down into the $300 to $400 range enabling touch. We didn’t have that last year.

He says that other Intel-based tablets are coming too, priced as low as $200, though he didn’t say what operating system these would use. He described them as “touch-enabled Intel based notebooks that are ultrathin and light using non-core processors.” These could be Android devices because Intel supplies chips for Android devices, too.

And he slipped in a light zinger at Windows 8 and its learning curve, too:

I’ve recently converted personally to Windows 8 with touch, and it is a better Windows than Windows 7 in the desktop mode … There is an adoption curve, and once you get over that ad! option c urve, I don’t think you go back. And we didn’t quite have that same kind of adoption curve in Windows 7 versus XP before it.

He’s certainly not alone in saying these things. Pundits have been telling Microsoft the same thing since before Windows 8 actually began shipping, while people were playing with the preview versions of it.

None of this will Otellini’s problem soon enough. After 40 years with the company, he is retiring in May.

In the past year, we’ve seen three quarters of the top 100 brands establish active profiles on Google+ and their customers have followers. These brands now have 20.9 million fans which is a growth of 9400% since December 2011 when only 222,000 followed them collectively.

But this growth isn’t that widespread across the hundred. In fact, the top ten brands on Google+ account for four out of five followers (78% of the total top 100 fans) which is 16.3 million followers. Four out of ten of these are big automotive brands including BMW, Mercedes-Benz, Nissan and Porsche, who are definitely taking advantage of the visual nature of Google+ (click on the image to the left to enlarge).

In the last year, there’s also been a marked improvement of Google+ pages showing in – surprise, surprise – Google search results from 0% to 20% in 2012. Obviously the marked improvement in followers and results have been due to major brand adoption and 25% of the top 100 integrating Google+ into their home page.

Youtube on the other hand, is continuing to grow into the brand space, slowly shedding itself of the rapid association with cat videos. 87% of the top brands have their own YouTube channel and collectively the top 100 have had over 3.15 billion views of their videos.

As you can see in the chart above, Red Bull, Google and Apple lead other brands in terms of subscribers and as YouTube makes the move to paid subscriptions, we’re sure to see even more broadcasters and brands follow.

Adobe might continue to crow about Flash and its importance on both the desktop and mobile devices, but there’s no lying to investors, and the company is pretty blunt about the threat of the iPhone and iPad in the end-of-quarter Form 10-Q it just filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission: it flatly says that “to the extent new releases of operating systems or other third-party products, platforms or devices, such as the Apple iPhone or iPad, make it more difficult for our products to perform, and our customers are persuaded to use alternative technologies, our business could be harmed.”

Now, Adobe has to make doom-and-gloom statements in its SEC filings — it also says that slowing PC sales or a failure to keep up with desktop OS development could harm its business — but the timing is crazy here, since just yesterday Apple changed the iPhone OS 4 SDK agreement to block devs from using the upcoming Flash CS5 iPhone cross-compiler to build iPhone apps. What’s more, Apple’s also using HTML5 for its new iAd platform, which could potentially undo Flash’s stranglehold on online advertising as well. Yeah, we’d say all that plus the recent push for HTML5 video across the web — and from Microsoft — could harm Adobe’s business just a little. Better hope that final version of Flash Player 10.1 is everything we’d hoped and dreamed of, because Adobe’s going to have to make a real stand here.

Digital Consigliere

Dr. Augustine Fou is Digital Consigliere to marketing executives, advising them on digital strategy and Unified Marketing(tm). Dr Fou has over 17 years of in-the-trenches, hands-on experience, which enables him to provide objective, in-depth assessments of their current marketing programs and recommendations for improving business impact and ROI using digital insights.